Best way to improve game loading times?

That will depend on a number of things - Speed of drive, type of controller (ide/sata/scsci) etc so it impossible to put a figure on it. If you provide more information on your setup/drives then it'll be easier to offer specific advice.
 
Atm I just have a single 7.2k sata drive, my motherboard supports raid 0, 1 and 1+0 through the built in sata controller.
 
I heard that one 10k drive is faster that a RAID 0 of 7.5k drives for loading applications, as here the seek is important, not so much the write. RAID 0 wins at writing but not seeking.


I'm sure rpstewart will quickly let us know if that's BS!
 
I went from a 300GB Seagate (7200.8) to 2x 500GB Seagate (7200.9) in RAID 1 and I noticed my load times increased dramatically in CNC3 - Before my friends C2D would easilly beat my load time and would be waiting for me but now I am nearly equal with him all but 2% - check my sig for sys spec.
 
I just set up a RAID0 and cs:s loads up a lot faster, not tried anything else on it like. But i saw a big improvement. I have an AB9 Pro, using the Intel sata raid controller. I also did it on a nice budget, i got 2x 3Gb/s SATA2 80GB's off the MM for £37 :)
 
You can't just say "RAID is faster" or "single drive is faster" simply because each application or task makes different demands on the disks. A RAID0 array will have the higher sustained transfer rate but a single disk (especially a 10krpm one) will have a better random access time. The layout of the files on the disk will determine which disk arrangement will give the better theoretical performance. A RAID0 array will read large files (like game levels etc) quicker whereas a single quick disk will cope better with smaller files scattered over the disk.

Of course all of this is theoretical, in both scenarios you only have one set of disk heads so any simultaneous disk access is going to throw things off.
 
If you're dealing with compressed files it's likely that the CPU will be able to decompress them faster than the disk can supply it with data so you won't see a huge difference.
 
Why do loading times with even the best hdds seem to be limited? Even raid 0 arrays don't seem to improve game loading times no matter what stripe size from what I've found out, it seems like they have hit a wall where no matter how powerful your system you are still limited. Would a raid 1 array on an os that supports split seeks improve performance more than raid 0, since it would on average reduce seek times, as well as offering equal if not better transfer rates?
 
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